


a day once dawned and it was beautiful

by friendly_ficus



Series: from a much outdated style [8]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: AU where they're basically gods, Canonical Animal Death, Gen, it's NOT trinket i promise but i want you to know that's In This, vague nods to canon and even vaguer nods to d&d
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-10
Updated: 2020-06-10
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:14:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24640672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/friendly_ficus/pseuds/friendly_ficus
Summary: The best thing you can do for your past: grab a shovel and dig it a grave.Interlude Four, Vex
Series: from a much outdated style [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/907551
Comments: 6
Kudos: 35





	a day once dawned and it was beautiful

**Author's Note:**

> A lot of this story (much of the beginning, particularly the entire trinket-acquisition sequence) relies on the backstory Laura wrote for Vex and Trinket. also, me extrapolating on Saundor’s whole... ick. Also just a note, this fic Will Not Make Sense without the rest of the series but if you wanna read it go ahead

Their years in Syngorn were... it’s complicated.

Vex, a child, wants to be loved. She wants to belong. She wants her mother and if she can’t have her mother there to hold her she wants a world that, if not comforting, at least makes comfort possible.

Syngorn is not a place designed for comfort. Well, not for  _ Vex’s  _ comfort. Not for her brother’s, either. They’re lesser creatures, in Syngorn. Unworthy children, Syldor’s lucky bastards, his  _ mistakes— _

Vax doesn’t seem to care about approval. He sits apart from it, sneaks away to shadowed corners or haylofts, causing a regular ruckus every time one of the servants is sent looking for him. Sometimes she goes with her brother. Most of the time she goes with her brother, but. It’s not enough to scorn Syngorn, for her, even once they leave it. The city follows her around, sets the stage in her dreams, simmers under her skin like a stain she can’t get out.

They were children, in Syngorn. It was not a good place to be Elania’s children.

So when people ask, rare as that is, she tells them it was complicated.

(It wasn’t. It just wasn’t good.)

\---

Here’s how it happens: Vex is frightened and Vex is young and Vex is alone. She’s in a cage until she isn’t.

She has a series of impressions: the bitter taste of adrenaline, the heat of blood spraying against her skin, the hilt of the hunting knife in her hand. She can hear, she can hear—had there been a noise? Had the poachers shouted? Had there been time to shout?

The poachers fell at her hands and it was so  _ easy _ with the hunting knife, so easy to kill them because she is terrified and shaking but not weak, never weak. She can’t be weak, it got her caught—still, she crumples, weeping. The lantern light is strange and glittering through her tears, shining against blood pooling on the forest floor. She can hear the noise again, guttural, animal, pained.

There’s a great bear at the center of the camp, wounded too badly for her to help. There’s a knife in her hand, dripping slowly into the dirt. There’s a foul stench in the air, rot and decay clogging her throat. Vex stands up.

This is a mercy, but all she can see before her is death: she grips the knife so tightly her fingers ache with it. 

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, and thrusts it home. 

The bear gives one last exhale and something in Vex just. Breaks.

_ I should be screaming,  _ she thinks; and then,  _ what is this. _

All around her, the night shadows of the forest grow longer, deeper. There’s a terrible groan as the earth splits, roots emerging from nowhere to drag the bodies of the poachers under. From the wound she gives the bear a dozen varieties of fungus sprout, spilling across the furry body that rapidly decays. Every horror that surrounds her is taken by the forest, subsumed, destroyed—the gory trophies of her captors either rot to nothing or are pulverized by the wind that whips up. 

It could be a minute, it could be an hour—everything eventually stills. There’s a moment where she realizes she isn’t breathing but she’s full of energy, full of power, just,  _ full.  _ As in, not hungry anymore. 

She gets halfway through a ragged inhale before she has to double over and dry heave.

Something has changed, irrevocably. Whatever just happened, Vex is certain she’s gotten the short end of the stick.

There’s the smallest sound to her left, when the clearing is quiet. At some point the lantern blew out, but the heavy clouds above her break and reveal the bright light of the moon.

A bear cub watches her with sad eyes, and Vex chokes on nothing for a moment when she realizes the knife she’d killed his mother with is still in her hands. 

It goes into her boot and she hefts the bear up in her arms, ignoring the way she should strain under the weight. He’s hers, her one chance to salvage something good out of this nightmare, the one new thing left to her. He snuffles around her hair before falling asleep, nose cold and wet against her neck.

When Vex leaves the clearing she doesn’t look back, not wanting to see, well, whatever could be there. So she misses the shrubs sprouting in the new soil, she misses the sapling acclimating to the root system where the great bear had been chained, she misses the life left in her wake and only remembers the death.

(In her boot, in the back of her mind, the knife hums along with her heartbeat.)

\---

“Trinket, I think,” she tells Vax at their campfire. “A Trinket of my very own.”

There’s something wrong with him. Or there’s something wrong with her (no  _ or  _ about it, she knows there’s something wrong with her) and she’s just, projecting or something. But there’s something different about her brother.

The firelight flickers low around them but it doesn’t touch his skin, shies away—he was already at the campsite when she made it back to him, fire going, but he doesn’t look any warmer. He’s hiding one of his hands, which means he’s probably injured it and doesn’t want her to worry. That’s a little ridiculous—she’s always worried about him.

She puts a hand on his shoulder to tease him into letting her take care of it and he  _ flinches. _

Vex withdraws with a speed she doesn’t mean to, moves a whole step back. Her hand, where she touched her brother, feels strangely numb. She realizes there’s still blood under her fingernails and feels sick; how can she try to care for an injury, how can she try to, to do anything.

“I’m fine,” Vax says, his back to her as he stares into the fire. 

She doesn’t waste time calling him a liar. “I’m going for a walk,” she blurts instead, because her hands feel sticky and she needs to scrub them in the nearby stream without him seeing. “Don’t wait up.”

Trinket is snoozing on her bedroll, tired out from the long night. Her brother watches the flames of the campfire and nods but doesn’t caution her like he normally would. As casually as she can, Vex flees into the trees.

\---

They aren’t camping in a very populated area, which means there’s not a path through the woods. Well, there’s not a path lined with stones or wagon tracks or anything like that, there’s not a path that people  _ meant  _ to make. But there’ve been travelers going to the stream for a lot longer than Vex has been around, which means that there are gaps in the underbrush and flattened sections of dirt, plenty of signs to direct her progress.

A huge moth flutters lazily across her vision, almost glowing under the moonlight. Vex tracks it as she continues to walk, and when she looks away she’s at a part of the stream she’s never seen. It’s quiet, just her and the sound of the water and the night-blooming flowers that are tethered to the banks. She spends a moment looking around, trying to get her bearings.

Further downstream, she hears a bird call she doesn’t recognize and sets off after it without really meaning to. The stream widens in a way it really shouldn’t in these woods, becomes a river, but Vex doesn’t think about it. She’s looking through the trees, now, for a glimpse of the bird or the moth from before or something she doesn’t have a name for, something unspoken and unfamiliar—when she reaches a bend in the river that forces her to stop, her reflection’s eyes are glowing a deep purple-blue, the color after sunset ends.

She crouches and starts scrubbing her hands, pulls the knife from her boot and cleans it, too. She needs this, she realizes distantly, she needs to figure things out, she needs to wash them clean. She can do this. She can do this.

There’s the snap of a twig behind her and she whirls to face a figure emerging from the treeline. The wind carries the scent of something metallic and sharp and Vex wrinkles her nose, wishing she’d had more time to clean her hands. 

Long-limbed, just tall enough to unnerve her, he approaches. His eyes glow a sharp, sickly yellow, and he stands almost too close to her.

“I know you,” Saundor says, offering his hand.

In the years to come, whether she hates or pities this lonely, uncertain girl, this is the moment she regrets. On the riverbank, the sound of the water rushing in her ears, Vex takes his hand.

\--- 

Saundor likes to promise her things.

He tells her about where they are, that it’s the Feywild, out of step with the Prime Material Plane. He shows her his domain, warns her away from the edges—but it is expanding, he assures her. Soon he will cover the whole of it, and it will be safe for her to traverse.

He promises her, her brother will not miss her. Not like this, not  _ sweet, broken Vex’ahlia.  _ Surely her brother wouldn’t want a murderer for a sister. Surely she needs his help overcoming her sudden introduction to power. She took his hand, he reminds her.

Saundor makes too many offers for her taste. He asks her for her heart—promises her eternity and a home and the whole of the Feywild, once he can hold it—and the offers are tempting. Vex  _ wants  _ a home. She wants to belong somewhere, to be loved—

But something in her very bones rejects his offers every time. She is young and his words are skillful, but she is meant to be  _ free,  _ and she does not trust him to make that happen. She spent too long in the cage in the poachers’ camp; sometimes when he looks at her, she recognizes the gleam in his eyes.

It’s not so simple, though. Every time she thinks of leaving, of taking off into the trees and finding her own path, he offers to teach her something new and she wants to learn, so she lets him teach her.

Saundor teaches Vex how to forget things. 

First, when she shivers in the wind and pulls her worn coat around her more tightly, he teaches her to forget cold. How to bury it inside herself, to allow one corner of her heart to freeze so the rest of her can be comfortable. Her hands no longer shake.

Second, when some immeasurable amount of time passes and her stomach growls, he teaches her to forget hunger. To dig her hand into one of the spots of sickness that dot his territory and be content with the squish of decay under her fingers, not hunger for a warm pot of stew cooked over a campfire, not hunger for conversation with her brother, not hunger for companionship at all. She is no longer lonely.

Third, when he finds her turning the knife over and over in her hands, he teaches her to forget doubt. 

“The knife upsets you,” he says in his reedy voice. “It reminds you of... unpleasant times. Give it to me, put them from your mind.”

A note: Vex’ahlia does not trust him, even now. 

But she does not feel the cold of the knife in her hands. She does not feel the hunger to understand what it might give her.

When she hands it to him, all she feels is a kind of numb relief.

\---

There are werewolves at the boundary Saundor has made. No, there are werewolves on the other side of the river. Surely the river was there before he was. Right? Time is strange here.

Vex does not feel cold. She does not hunger for food or companionship. She does not doubt. 

She is still curious.

Saundor has secreted himself somewhere away with the knife, murmuring something about deciphering it. He isn’t there to urge her away from the river, to lure her back with a lesson or an offer. So, she goes.

“You’re not from here,” one of the fairies simpers as she passes a gathering of them beneath a large, discolored leaf. “You don’t belong.”

(Saundor set them to watch her. He thinks she doesn’t know, but she’s forgotten doubt. She is certain of it.)

“Whatever,” she says, ducking past the cluster. She can hear the river in the distance. She can hear the howling.

The werewolves are fighting something, a hulking patchwork of creatures, haphazardly strung together. Vex catches a glimpse of antlers, the huge silhouette. It roars strangely, multiple tones contesting each other.

They need help. They’re on the other side of the river. She has no weapons. They need help.

Vex  **_inhales_ ** _ ,  _ opens glowing eyes. 

_ I need to cross the river,  _ she thinks, and it stops flowing. Light as a pondskater, she darts across the surface.

_ I need to help,  _ she thinks, and the trees—untouched by Saundor’s influence, untouched by anyone but her—rise from the ground. Their branches become spears and, well, do what spears do.

When it’s over, and some of the werewolves are carving the kill, their leader offers her a cut of the meat. When she declines, he growls what might be a curse.

“You’re one of  _ his  _ then, hmph. Don’t eat?”

“I don’t need to anymore,” Vex says, and realizes that this is the first conversation she’s had with someone that isn’t Saundor in... well. Time is strange here. Too long.

“You’ve forgotten hunger,” the wolf snarls, rough voice grating against her ears. “What else have you forgotten, little ranger.”

It isn’t a question, but she answers anyway. “Cold. Doubt.”

“Do you miss those things, ranger. Or are you better without them.”

“I—”

“Why did you come here. Why did you cross the river, ranger,” he doesn’t let her finish. “We hunt because we are hungry. We move because we are cold. We are watchful because we doubt. What have you forgotten, ranger. What have you  _ lost.” _

She is speechless.

“Hrmph. When you decide, ranger, what you want. What you have lost. We will aid you, as you have aided us.”

\---

She is back on the other side of the river, watching the water flow, when Artagan comes to her. The river is older than Saundor. 

(She had doubted that, before. She had doubted, after being taught to forget doubt. Saundor, who has taught her these lessons, who promises too much, who looked at her and said he knew her—Saundor is a  _ liar.) _

He doesn’t bother with the Garmelie trick, fun as it is. He’s heard about someone new under Saundor’s wing, caught the grumbling of a werewolf on the wind.

When he sees her, wild young Vex’ahlia, she’s wilting in the deep shade of the bog. The canopy overhead is thick with leaves and dark with the tarry sap. 

“What do you think about all of this, then?” he asks, gesturing at the slow drip of it.

“I’m not much for thinking things through, lately,” she says with a bitter laugh. Everything since the poachers feels like one long blur of bad decisions, misery punctuated by dread.

Watching her with violently green eyes, Artagan sees her on three scales. On the smallest level, individual blades of grass are greener the closer to Vex’ahlia they happen to be. The very air around her is a little clearer, somehow filtered through  _ something.  _ On another level, he sees her influence on the flow of the river, the way she crossed it to help the wolves. The knife in her hand, a trek through the woods with a bear cub in her arms like a child.

On a, shall we say  _ cosmic  _ scale, she’s. Well. To be perfectly honest, Artagan doesn’t really like looking on a large scale. He doesn’t like to take the long view. It’s... it takes the fun out of existence, most of the time. But if you  _ had  _ to look through what he supposes a god’s view is, the potential in Vex’ahlia is, well. She’s got a lot of  _ something,  _ that’s for sure. 

He has no idea what it means. Fascinating.

“So what, you’ll stay here? Turn away from anyone who ever mattered to you and decay like the rest of this place?” He’s needling her. He’s very good at that, he’s been told.

“What do you want me to do,  _ fix  _ it?” There’s a sharp wind, harsh enough to rustle even branches as heavy as the ones above them. Vex shivers.

“Sure, that could be interesting.”

She laughs again. “I’m a hunter, not a healer.”

“Why not be both?”

(Taking the dreaded  _ long view,  _ he has no idea if it’s possible. Things can be interesting that way. If you like that sort of thing.)

A moth flits past them both, moonlight reflecting off of its wings in defiance of the perpetual twilight of the Feywild. The wind stirs Vex’s hair. She wants so much, to see her brother again, to steal back the part of herself that’s gone cold, to eat, to be full.

She doesn’t want to doubt, but, hey. If it comes with the package, whatever.

\---

A sticking point: the knife.

It’s hers, is the thing. It’s hers in a way nothing else is, even if she doesn’t really want it. 

If she goes to Saundor, though, he’ll look at her with his eyes and he’ll talk to her and he’ll, he’ll. She doesn’t know. She isn’t going to risk it.

She steals a bow from him instead of searching for it, because if she stays here even a moment longer it will be the ruin of her. 

She wants to cross the river. She crosses the river, scrambling across the surface of the water. It’s more difficult, now that she can doubt it. Artagan is watching her with laughing eyes.

She turns, a moment,  _ I owe you one  _ forming in the back of her mouth. But she sees the curiosity in his green eyes, and stops that promise cold. 

Instead, she offers, “I’ll come back. I’ll figure it out, and come back.”

The archfey tilts his head to the side, amused. “You don’t need to promise anyone anything, you know.”

“No, but he lied to me. He twisted me into, into one of his  _ creatures.  _ It’s a threat.”

“Vex’ahlia of Shademurk,” the archfey muses, watching her blend away into the forest. “What  _ will  _ you become?”

(Somewhere, a werewolf howls.)

She vanishes back into the trees. The turn of the Feywild, disrupted by her arrival, settles again into the rhythm of growth and decay. Time bends purple around it all. 

In the distance, after she’s crossed the last river, she hears Saundor’s furious scream.

\---

Something in her echoes the screaming but she walks on, she walks forever or for an hour, who can say—she returns to Vax and Trinket. Rather, they find her in a hollow tree trunk with a white-knuckle grip on a mysterious bow, shuddering.

They pile together to stave off the cold and her brother braids her hair, Trinket wiggling so her hands are resting on the soft fur of his chest. 

It’s not that she wants to leave Vax.  _ Damn it all,  _ it’s not that she wants to leave Vax but she needs to know herself without him. She needs to know herself without other people, for a little while. And for a few months they’ve been coming apart at the seams a little, the two of them. Pulling away by inches.

He’s her brother, her twin; nothing will ever take that away. And she keeps the ribbons he ties in Trinket’s fur, every one of them.

\---

The bow is... complicated.

Trinket is mercifully uncomplicated. She follows him as much as he follows her, sometimes. They clear out another den of poachers from the woods near Vasselheim with the help of a charming Zhara Hydris, hunt some things for the Slayer’s Take for a while. 

There are a lot of people who want to get to Vasselheim, as it turns out. It’s something of a destination. Vex has a knack for finding lost travelers, be they individual pilgrims or entire caravans. She guides them back to the road every time. From there they wander to Kymal on an entirely roundabout way, catch a show of a musical troupe that she likes before moving on. 

The bow is... the thing about the bow is, every single thing she kills with it grows a tree and she isn’t sure if that’s the  _ bow  _ or a new  _ her  _ thing. There are a lot of new  _ her  _ things to catalogue.

She never gets lost. She knows when  _ other  _ people are lost. If she wants, she can bring the trees to life. Well, more to life. The list goes on.

It’s like stretching a muscle she’s never known to stretch, sort of. It’s sore sometimes. And she  _ never  _ feels what she felt the first night with the knife in her hand, the heady rush of power and energy. Maybe it’s better that way.

Trinket is the first living creature she ever heals, besides herself. It’s a little thing, a large thorn in his paw making walking a pain. She pulls it out while saying soothing things and when she **_pushes_** at it with the new part of herself there’s a brisk breeze and the smell of new leaves. When she pulls her hand away he’s entirely healed.

The bow is complicated.

(It’s not. It just isn’t bad.)

\---

Vax calls her from all the way in Emon, something about a dragon and she dares it—a single step through the Feywild, to shorten the distance. She dares it all to come for her now, Trinket grown at her side and the bow in her hands and the fury she’s carrying like a shield.

(Quietly, privately, she knows she’s lost something. She’s going to take it  _ back.) _

Shaun Gilmore is a good man, she decides. She decides it when she’s introduced to him, but it’s cemented when he helps her brother blur with speed as a wrought-iron dragon takes to the sky above them. It’s a hunt like she’s never had, the dragon, and it feels so  _ right  _ to be there at her brother’s side, arrows crackling with lightning.

From the grinding iron, in the center of a cage of ribs where a white-hot heart glows, at the same instant Vax shoves two daggers through the brain, a tree grows before the heat reduces it to ash. Then, there’s a party.

Vex wants to be loved. Vex the Dragonslayer is easy for people to love, even just a little bit. Enough to ask her to dance, enough to tell a story about. It’s fun, like putting on a costume, not like telling a lie.

(When Scanlan picks up on it in Kraghammer, it feels like bringing him in on the game. He plays accompanist as well as author and it’s just  _ fun  _ to be in cahoots with someone about it.)

When Vax wants to leave the party, of course she’s ready to go. But she doesn’t forget the feeling of the  _ win. _

\---

Their new friends are sure  _ something.  _

Percival is more reliable than she thinks he ought to be. Or, he’s more reliable than  _ he  _ thinks he ought to be. She decides to trust him in Emon, facing down a demon in the Emperor’s throne room. She decides to trust him in the Underdark, separated from the others with only him and Vax for company. It keeps paying off, trusting him.

Keyleth is powerful. Well, they’re all powerful but Keyleth is  _ powerful.  _ It’s a wonder to see her do it, really, when she brings a dozen things to life. When she cracks the world like an egg. It’s kind of awesome to see. Maybe she’s a little jealous of it, of the way Keyleth makes things grow, of the way Pike heals without hesitation. But she’s not sick with it, not burning inside—maybe they can help her. Maybe all of them could help her, if she asked.

It takes two hours to get through the story, not that she tells it all. They don’t need to know about Trinket’s mother, about how persuasive Saundor had been, about all the things she let get mangled. That’s. Those things are hers, just as much as the knife should be. They’re not  _ for  _ everyone. But she tells them that she had a knife, that it was strong because it was her and  _ she  _ was strong.

It’s awkward to share even this much, makes her feel vulnerable in a way she doesn’t like. But she wants it back, she reminds herself that she  _ wants it back,  _ that even if the world didn’t need it she would eventually have told this story. Maybe it makes it easier. She doesn’t exactly have anything to compare it to. It’s the right thing to do. It’s like ripping open her chest and inviting everyone to watch her heart beat.

In the shadowed corner of the room, where she has not ordered her brother, Vax is silent and still. He is, in that moment, as lost as she has ever seen him be. 

Vex’ahlia reaches out a hand—he walks away.

**Author's Note:**

> title for this fic comes from ‘From the Morning’ by Nick Drake  
> twin angst?? in MY this section of the fic? it’s more likely than you think. really something that is gonna get worked on in the next plot stuff which will happen! at some point! i know it’s been a while again but i hope this installment was good  
> leave a comment and let me know what you think! this entire work WILL be finished someday.


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